Amy Plum's Blog, page 37

Bookplates – long-term offer

Laurent just got back from New York with my brand new bookplates. And I can not wait to start giving them out. Aren't they pretty? The drawings were done by Johanna Basford, the Scottish artist who drew the swirls on the cover of DIE FOR ME.

And this is what it will look like inside your book:

These are my gifts to anyone who writes an Amazon and/or Barnes & Noble review for DIE FOR ME. Just send me an email to amy   attt   amy plum books dottt com (take out the extra "t"s, add appropriate punctuation, and squish everything together) telling me what your Amazon and/or B&N user name is and your mailing address, and I will send it to you. If you have already written an Amazon or B&N review for DIE FOR ME in the past, that counts too. (And don't worry, you don't have to write a novel-unless you want to. Just a sentence is fine!)

You can receive a total of 2 bookplates – one for Amazon and one for B&N (which means 1 for you and 1 for a friend), and the offer is international. If you're asking for 2, please tell me about both at the same time so I can use 1 envelope.

Thank you all for your enthusiastic support!

The Author's Husband: Creative Mode

I just got back from 3 days in Paris, where I have been writing, thinking, dreaming revenants. I'm 26k into DIE FOR ME, Book 3, which may be a little longer than the others, so I'm probably 1/4 done with the first draft. Which means that my brain is crawling all over the plot – but is not, unfortunately, very present when it comes to every day life.

I was so glad to get back last night to see my family. I whipped out the Hopper Balls that I bought my kids (during a quick research break in the mall under the Louvre), and after Laurent inflated them they went bouncing all over the house on them. I read them stories, put them to bed, got up this morning and got them ready for school. And as soon as they left, my mind went back to Revenant Land.

Over lunch, Laurent and I went over next week's calendar. He's leaving for a business trip, and since he is usually the family chauffeur—taking the kids to school and sports and doctors—I had realized I had no idea what time things take place or even where some of them are.

So I noted everything down for every day he will be gone, dates, times, accessories needed. I was able to focus for about ten minutes, and then my brain swerved back to my book and I told Laurent about the new character I'm coming up with. I talked about this one historical figure that I want my guy to have been associated with, and then said I needed to go walk and think.

As I walked I tried to figure out where the revenant came from, how he arrived where he is, how he died, and all that. By the end of the hour I had figured most of it out, except for the death part and what kind of society he hung with when he was alive. I walked back into my house, took off my hat and sat down to pour myself a glass of water, and Laurent came into the room, said something, and went back out.

"Edith Wharton!" I said, jumping up, suddenly knowing what type of crowd my character had mingled with in his human days.

Laurent stuck his head back into the kitchen and stared at me. "I say my mom can take the kids during fall break, and you say 'Edith Wharton?'" He shook his head. "I'm kind of worried about leaving them alone with you."

Him and me both. I'm in creative mode. Not practical mode. At least the kids can count on getting some epic crazy bedtime stories.

Stories From France, The Castle Story, Part VI (the end)

So those are my stories from my job as a castle tour guide. (If you haven't read them, they are: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V.) I have many more stories from that summer. But the highlights included:

I gave a personal tour to the American ambassador, his wife (George Bush's cousin), and their bodyguards.

Me w/the ambassador + wife. Don't ask me what I'm wearing. It looks like a pink bullet-proof vest.

I cursed in front of a group of children. Okay it wasn't like the F-word or anything, but I said "dégueulasse" (gross) instead of "dégoûtant" (disgusting) and got told off by the teachers, and then had to hear the kids repeating the bad word and giggling for the rest of the tour. I guess it would be the equivalent of saying "fart" in front of forty 6-year-olds. I swear: I DIDN'T KNOW IT WAS A BAD WORD!!!

Children gathering in the castle courtyard for my tour, as I prepare to corrupt their little minds

I called the VIP castle director "tu" instead of "vous" in front of the mayor.


I ran an experiment in the castle staff room where I put a box of high-quality chocolate next to a bag of M&Ms and timed how fast it took for the rest of the staff to eat them. (This was at the request of my blog followers. The M&Ms won.)

The chocolate challenge

And lots of other mishaps and hi-jinks…

BUT I ALSO

Translated all of the room cards into English and
Did the historical research for the objects in the Sacred Arts room, which was translated into four different languages and is still there to THIS VERY DAY.

So in the end, everyone was happy. Especially me when it was FINALLY OVER. Want to see?

Me on my last day as castle tour guide

Stories from France: The Castle Story, Part V

This is Part 5 of my Castle Story. Like Part 4, it's from my unpublished book IN THE VINES!

The key to my office in the castle

One morning I walked into my office to see Audrey poring over a large book-bound calendar. "We have a school group coming next week. You can take half of the children, and I'll take the rest."

"Children?" I repeated, panic stricken.

Hearing the note of fear in my voice, Audrey looked up at me quizzically. "I don't know how to talk to children," I said.

"Of course you do," Audrey said, looking at me like I had lost my marbles. "You talk to them like you would adults, just use simpler words."

I sat down in front of her and tried to explain. "Audrey, I told Fabienne in the beginning that I didn't feel capable of giving tours in French, but she wouldn't listen to me. So when she insisted on my doing it, I wrote a tour using the books you gave me and memorized it. I don't even understand half of the words that I am using. So I can't just 'dumb it down' for kids. I would have to rewrite the whole thing, and learn it by heart."

The elderly women sat stock still and stared at me. "You memorized your tour, but you don't understand what you're saying?"

"I'm starting to understand it. There are just a few words now that I don't get," I muttered, sheepishly.

She shook her head as if to banish my words from her mind. "Listen, the other guide is off next week, so it's just you and me. There are sixty kids coming with some parents and teachers to accompany them. We have to split the group. It's too big for me to take on my own: we couldn't even fit the whole group into The Insignia Room. I'm sorry – I don't have a choice."

Walking across the room to my desk, I massaged my throbbing temples with my fingertips. I sat down, got out my dictionary and started writing a children's version of my tour.

I stood in front of the group of thirty ten-year olds, thinking to myself that it would have been easier to get a job teaching Genghis Khan's army to dance ballet than giving castle tours to hyperactive school children. As they leapt around the room a handful of parents and teachers stood silently behind, looking on with amusement, daring me to try to control the situation. "I wouldn't lie on that bed unless you want to get lice," I said, causing a young show-off to leap out of his reclining position on a 15th-century canopy bed and begin scratching himself furiously.

"OK everybody, sit down on the floor," I commanded. Several children took that to mean "lie down spread-eagle, blocking the other tourists from entering or exiting the room." I rolled my eyes and looked at the parents. They grinned. "I said sit, not lie," I said, pointing to the offenders until they sat up.

Someone took a photo, popping their flash in my eyes. "I mentioned at the beginning of the tour – no flash photos!" I glanced back at the teacher for support, but she had suddenly become absorbed in a tapestry hanging in one of the back corners of the room.

"Everybody be still and listen," I growled, and then stumbled my way through an explanation of how the rooms were used in the Middle Ages, and what purpose each piece of furniture served. I asked the children questions to try to get them involved. Some of them paid attention. Others sat in the back and made farting noises. Finally I asked if there were any questions. A handful of children raised their hands frantically, and I congratulated myself on having caught their attention.

I pointed to a random hand, and a skinny boy with glasses leaned eagerly towards me and asked, "Would you die if someone poured boiling oil on you, or would your skin just blister and peel off?"

I looked up at the parents, who were peering out of the window, apparently studying the castle's back gardens with great concentration. "Does anyone have a question about what I was talking about?" I replied. Half of the hands went down.

"Where did the king and queen go to the bathroom?" a small blond girl asked seriously. I spotted the teacher slipping out of the room through a side door. Luckily I had come across a paragraph on medieval sanitation in my readings, and replied that there were sometimes toilet holes within the castle walls.

"So where did it go?" someone else asked.

"Where did what go?" I replied, confused.

"The caca and pipi!" they replied in unison.

"On the ground outside, I suppose," I responded.

"Ewwwwwwww!!!" moaned the children in ecstasy, rolling around on the floor.

The remaining questions included:

"Why didn't the king and queen sleep in the same bed?"

"Why is that window open?"

"Are there dungeons?"

And, regarding a large metal-bound safe opened only by coded levers, "So what if you used a flamethrower? Then could you get it open?"

Finally there was only one hand remaining up. "Yes, what is your question?" I asked the biggest boy, who was looking at me with a smirk.

"Can I take your picture?" he said, holding up his camera and wagging his eyebrows up and down.

"No," I said, and led everyone into the last room, where I proceeded to upset half of the group by giving my regular speech about the high infant mortality rate in the Middle Ages, illustrated by the fact that seven of Anne of Brittany's nine children died in infancy.

By the time the teacher had comforted the last crying child and left the room throwing me a look of pure hatred, I was ready to collapse. Knowing that Audrey had another half hour before her tour was over, I went back to our office, closed the door, and turned the enormous iron key, locking myself in and everyone else out. Then I lay down on the floor, resting my face on the ancient ceramic tiles, letting their coolness sooth my burning cheeks and thought to myself, "What the hell do I think I'm doing here?"

The next day Audrey told me that I would be taking another children's group the following week.

"Audrey, please don't ask me to do that again," I begged. "Yesterday was a catastrophe."

"I'm sure you did just fine!" she said, matter-of-factly.

I told her how awful the group had been, and she reassured me that yesterday's group had been from a bad part of town and was known for its behavioral problems. "Next week's group is here on vacation from a wealthy suburb of Paris, for their summer camp, and although they're younger, they will be very well behaved," she reassured me.

"How old?" I asked.

"Six," she replied, as she penciled my name into the book.

"Six years old!" I moaned to Laurent that night over dinner. "That's totally different from ten years old. I'll have to write a completely different tour!"

"Mais non," he said, laughing at my distress. "Just say the same stuff."

"Well, I'm definitely cutting out the dying medieval children part this time. Do you think I should skip the Stag Hunt tapestries as well? Won't that scare them?"

"No, kids love that gory stuff! Definitely leave it in," Laurent replied.

I confirmed with Audrey the next day. "We always talk about the Stag Hunt tapestries in our tour," she responded, surprised. "Why would we leave it out?"

"Don't you think it's a bit gory for little children?" I replied.

She looked at me quizzically and responded, "It's a hunt. It's historical. Keep it in the tour."

I reminded myself of the dead animals one always sees hanging on hooks in French markets, and figured that, unlike American children who are used to seeing unrecognizable meat sold under cellophane, French kids must be used to the fact that a furry bunny had to be killed to put that "lapin á la moutarde" on their plates. I sat down at my desk to re-translate the tour using six-year old vocabulary.

A week later, I stood in front of a group of tiny children wearing identical blue summer-camp caps, pointing to a tapestry showing a hunter driving a dagger into a stag's heart.

"This group of tapestries shows a stag hunt," I said uncomfortably. "In the first one, you can see the hunter killing the stag with a knife. And over here, in the second tapestry, you see him hanging the stag from a tree, slitting its stomach open, and feeding its intestines to the hunting dogs."

Evisceration of the stag, with hunting dogs feeding on the entrails.

By the time I got to the last tapestry, which depicts the tradition called the "Tribute of the Hoof" where the hunter cuts off the foreleg of the dead deer and offers it to his lord, the teenage girls chaperoning the group were looking at each other in horror and disgust. The children stared at me wide-eyed as if, instead of talking about art history, I was recounting a slasher film to them, scene by gory scene.

Forty-five minutes later I was lying in my office, hot cheek to the cool floor, thinking about the group of six-year olds, two towns over at summer camp, who weren't going to sleep a wink that night.

Stories from France: Castle Story Part IV

Here's Part 4 of my castle story, this bit from my unpublished manuscript IN THE VINES. (Read Part III here.)

The view of the fortress wall from my office window.

I stood in the courtyard of the 15th-century chateau, with the ruins of a 10th-century fortress perched on top of a hill in front of me. My knees shook uncontrollably as I tried to keep a calm demeanor and steady voice. I was surrounded by a group of about fifty French tourists, all holding tickets and fanning themselves with brochures.

I'm going to faint, I thought, as my mouth opened and the words came out in a squeak: "Hello and welcome to the Chateau de Langeais. My name is Amy. I am usually the English tour guide here, but today they needed me to fill in with the French tours." (Okay, making it sound like I had actually given a tour before was a lie, but just a little one.) "So I hope you will be patient with me as I massacre your language. And, more importantly, I hope you have a good sense of humor."

Obviously they didn't, since my pleasantries won grins from a couple of teenagers and a worried look from the rest. I heard rumblings of discontent, and a few people looked like they were debating whether they should skip the tour and visit the chateau on their own. I hurried ahead before any desertions could take place. "Please feel free to stop me for questions, or let me know if you don't understand me. So, here we go…The fortress we see on the hill before us dates to the year 994…"

And for the next hour I spouted stories and dates and art and furniture terms. I had brought some note cards with me, in case I blanked, but was too nervous to look at them more than once or twice. At one point, I had to ask the group what the platform under one of the medieval beds was called in French. Some rolled their eyes, but others treated it like a game and shouted the word out, laughing.

Since I didn't have the right vocabulary to ad lib, I had spent days memorizing the whole tour word-for-word. So when I got stuck, I wasn't able to fake my way out of it. And there were several words I was using, dug out of the history books that Audrey had loaned me, that I had never even heard pronounced. But all in all I felt like I was doing pretty well. Until we got to the Wedding Hall.

I stood in front of a double portrait of Charles VIII and Anne of Brittany, telling my group the story of their marriage: the war between their lands, the wedding held for diplomatic reasons instead of love, children they produced and lost, and finally the death of Charles himself, just seven years after the couple had married.

As I explained the strange manner of his death, by a sharp blow to his head on a low door frame (possibly while riding a horse through a castle), I saw surprise flash across several faces, and then a low rumble of laughter spread through the group. Those who hadn't been listening leaned over to get an explanation from their giggling neighbors and then exploded into laughter themselves. I looked at the group quizzically, but continued with the tour.

Just one room later I stood in front of an enormous hanging tapestry that had a surface woven with hundreds of tiny wildflowers. "This is a 'mille-fleur' (or 'thousand-flower') tapestry," I meant to say, but instead the words, "mille-feuille" came out of my mouth. I had just told my group that the tapestry hanging before them represented a cream-filled pastry. General hilarity ensued. The laughter was harder and longer this time, the crowd having warmed up with my previous unintentional joke.

By the end of the tour, people were chuckling and slapping each other on the back, while repeating to each other the more entertaining of my mishaps. As the group dispersed, several people walked up to me to congratulate me on my effort. One lady confessed, "When you warned us you were going to massacre our language, I almost left the tour. But your French isn't that bad. And no one that followed your tour will ever forget it – that's for sure!"

I groaned as I opened the door to the office that I was sharing with Audrey, and collapsed into a chair. "How did it go?" she asked. I told her that I knew I had made a few mistakes, but I didn't understand why my explanation of Charles's death had made everyone burst into laughter.

I repeated the paragraph for her word-for-word. Her eyes opened in surprise as she raised her hand to her mouth and started giggling. "What?" I asked, confused. Audrey struggled to compose herself and said, "You told them that King Charles VIII died by slamming his head in the door."

And now…CASTLE STORY PART V

Stories From France: Castle Story Part III

This is copied directly from my blog 5 years ago, just a couple of weeks after the scene that took place in Castle Story Part II:

Do you know who this handsome guy is? Neither do I, and that's a problem because starting next Wednesday I am going to be talking to groups of people about him IN FRENCH.

The chateau where I have a summer job just asked me if I can start a couple of weeks early, since one of their regular guides quit. And instead of giving tours in English, they need me to give them IN FRENCH.

Anyone know the word for drawbridge in French? How about ramparts? And how about "The facade facing the town is made up of a crenelated wall, flanked with two turrets and big pepperbox towers with machicolation and a rampart walk."? Me neither.

But it's not only the vocabulary thing. It's the fact that I am going to be lecturing to French people about their own history, while simultaneously slaughtering THEIR OWN LANGUAGE.  I am immobilized by panic and pre-emptive shame.

By the way, Prince Charming above is Louis XI. And I am Amy, your guide, otherwise known as "that girl who is up Shit Creek with only a French dictionary and some index cards for a paddle".

Stories From France: Castle Story, Part II

Like Part I, this is from my unpublished memoir, IN THE VINES, and took place around 5 years ago. Enjoy!

"My" castle

Fabienne called back the next day to confirm that she had secured a negligible raise in my pay. I accepted. Even if she hadn't succeeded, my answer would have been yes. Having had time to think about it, I concluded that this was the only job I had a chance of getting, bar moving to Paris. At this point, I would have paid them to employ me, as long as it meant getting me out of the house and using my brain once again.

"Stop by next week, and Audrey, our guide manager, will give you some study materials."

"Thanks, Fabienne," I replied. "And just to confirm, the position is for English Language Tour Guide, correct?"

"Absolutely," she said. "Unless we need help in French, of course, but that might not even happen."

"Right," I said, and hung up the phone, pushing away a sense of foreboding.

The next week I parked in the château's employee parking lot and walked confidently up to the front desk. The same greeter who had half ignored me when I inquired about English tours the first time looked up and gave me a huge smile.

"Congratulations! I've heard we are going to be colleagues. I'm Martine," she said.

"Amy," I responded, and shook her hand.

"Audrey's waiting for you in her office. Up the stairs to the second floor, and it's the door on the right."

I climbed up the ancient spiral staircase as if in a dream. It was straight from a fairy tale castle, built entirely of huge stones with curly cast-iron window bars and a rope handrail. I emerged into a room hung with ancient tapestries and furnished with painted wooden chests. An enormous fireplace took up one wall and cast-iron chandeliers hung from massive ceiling beams. I felt a frisson of wonder as I realized that my own country, America, wasn't half as old as most of the objects here.

Opening a dwarf-sized wooden door in one corner of the room, I walked into a small office, in which sat a tiny old lady. She could have played the part of the woman at the spinning wheel in Sleeping Beauty, if she hadn't been dressed in a smart suit and wrapped in an enormous woolen shawl.

"Close the door, dear, you're letting in the draft," she said, drawing the shawl tighter around her miniature frame.

"I'm Amy," I said, walking up to her desk and reaching across to shake her hand as I sat down.

"Ah yes, the American," she said. "I have some reading materials for you." She took out a large folder of stapled documents and pushed it across the desk. "You'll need to return them to me when you're done. And here are some books," she said motioning to a large stack of tomes on a side table.

"I'm not quite sure I understand," I asked. "Do you not have a written-out tour that you want me to use?"

"Well, I have an outline for the tour that I give, and you're welcome to join in on this morning's tour if you want to take notes. But each guide writes her own tour."

"I think that would probably be a good idea," I responded, wondering how long it would take me to read all of these materials in French and translate the important bits for an English tour.

"Come along, then. There's one starting in a few minutes," she said, checking her watch, and we left the tiny office to walk together to the castle's front entrance.

The next forty-five minutes were pure pleasure. Tagging along behind a group of French tourists, I listened as Audrey spun tales of murderous dukes, land-grabbing kings, and princes marrying duchesses in order to end wars. As we moved from room to room, she pointed out the tapestries and furniture and described how everything was used in the everyday routine of the castle's inhabitants: both noble and common. I was so enchanted that I forgot to take notes, and when the spell wore off I had a paltry page full of unintelligible doodles.

"I hope you enjoyed it," Audrey said, as I scooped the mountain of books and papers from her desk on the way out.

"It was wonderful. I hope I'm able to make things half as interesting as you do."

She laughed. "Well, since you're starting in June, you have six weeks to learn the material. Feel free to phone or stop by if you have any questions."

As I walked across the wooden drawbridge and down the stone steps to the street, four and a half centuries fell away like a curtain, and life in the 21st century hit me full in the face, as a group of biking tourists in matching neon shorts-n-shirts cycled by.

For the hundredth time since I had moved to France, I got that feeling: the one where if you had walked up to the me of thirty years ago, a little girl riding her bike under the scorching Alabama sky, and told me I'd be living in France and working in a medieval castle, I would have thought you were insane.

Over the drawbridge and back to reality

Tomorrow: PART III, OH YES, IT HAPPENED.

Stories from France: Castle Story Part I

The following is from my unpublished memoir IN THE VINES – I'll give you some today and more tomorrow!

My potential place of employment

I was living in the middle of nowhere. I had just closed down my 19th-century paintings business. And I had a four-month old baby at home. What kind of job could I find speaking a French that was passable but definitely not professional?

It would have to be something in English. Considering that I had a master's degree in art history and was living in the middle of castle country, I figured looking for a job as a tour guide might be a good place to start. So I began visiting the local châteaux and abbeys to see if any offered tours in English. None did.

My last stop was the Château de Langeais, a medieval castle just a twenty minute drive from my house. Walking into a grandiose stone lobby with low arched ceilings and a fireplace you could park a horse in, I asked the young, snobby looking woman behind the welcome desk if they offered tours in English.

"Non," she replied, and looked back down at her work, which consisted entirely of shuffling tourist brochures around on the countertop.

"I'm just asking because I am an art historian and am looking for a job as a tour guide."

She looked back up with an interested glimmer in her eye. "Well then, you are in luck. We have never had tours in English at the Château de Langeais, but our administration has talked about starting this summer. Send us your resumé."

"Who do I send it to?" I replied, putting on my best blasé look, while actually buzzing with excitement at having even the slightest shot at a job.

"The Château de Langeais," she answered.

"Yes, but is there anyone in particular I should address it to?"

"The personnel department," she replied with a wicked grin. We both knew that a castle with a tiny staff wouldn't have a personnel department, but I thanked her anyway, and went home to attempt a translation of my resumé in French.

A week later, I was called in for an interview.

This, however, caused me more angst than excitement. An interview meant that I had to speak in French, while simultaneously coming off as passably intelligent. Although my casual conversational French was by now understandable, interview-French was not in my repertoire. I practiced by calling Laurent by the formal "vous" instead of "tu" for a few days, which made me feel very 19th-century, like I was his chambermaid or mistress.

*****

Seated stiffly on an antique chair in front of an old leather-topped desk, I faced my interviewer and concentrated on breathing. Fabienne, the castle's "personnel manager," a beautiful willowy brunette, looked over my resumé and nodded to herself.

"Thank you for inviting me to interview," I opened. "It was nice of you to see me on such short notice." And then I froze. I had used the word "tu" instead of "vous", basically putting Fabienne on the same level as me, or inferring she was my friend. My hand flew to my mouth, and I gasped. "I'm sorry," I apologized. "The 'vous' and 'tu' is so confusing when we only use the one word 'you' in English."

Fabienne raised an eyebrow and, grinning, continued to peruse my resumé. She asked me a few questions about my degree and experience in the art world. "We are looking for a perfectly bilingual guide for the summer," she concluded, "and with your qualifications the position could also involve some research and translating. The job is full-time, six days a week, from June through August, and the pay is…crap."

Alright, she didn't actually say "crap". But she might as well have, considering the hourly rate she threw out at me.

I made some calculations in my head. Childcare wasn't available on the weekends in the countryside. And since the salary was about the same as what a child sitter cost, I would basically be working for free. I braced myself and told Fabienne that I could work Monday to Friday, and only if the pay was higher.

Fabienne nodded as she listened, then said she would approach the castle director with my concerns while I went home and thought about it.

But before I left, I thought of something she had said earlier. "If you are looking for an English tour guide, why are you asking for someone who is 'perfectly bilingual'?"

"Because if, by chance, we didn't have any English-speaking visitors on a certain day, you could give tours in French instead."

Feeling faintly nauseous, I formulated my confession. "With my medieval art history background, I would be perfectly comfortable giving château tours in English. I would be happy to do translations, and the research would be no problem. But to be honest, I don't think I am capable of giving tours in French. I am not bilingual, and the language needed would be too specialized for my vocabulary."

"Don't be silly," Fabienne responded, dismissively. "People love an accent. And if you make little mistakes in French they will think it's charming. I'm sure you'll do just fine."

"Honestly, Fabienne, I have to refuse the French tours. I wouldn't want to be an embarrassment to the château."

"Listen," she said, standing up and holding her hand out across the desk to shake mine. "It probably won't even happen, so don't worry about it."

As I stood, I glanced at the stack of resumés sitting on her desk, little passport photos stapled into the upper right corner of each, as is the custom in France. The other candidates all looked fifteen years old. No wonder she was interested. Even with a small pay raise, for a "bilingual" guide with a master's degree in medieval art history, she would be getting a bargain basement deal. I left, praying to the paycheck gods that they would choose an English-only guide with experience over every employer's dream: cheap labor.

TO BE CONTINUED…

An example of my French when I moved here

Since I'm going to tell you some stories about when I first moved to the French countryside, I need you to understand how basic (read…BAD) my French was when I got here. This is taken directly from my blog 5 years ago:

—–

I went to the pharmacy this morning to pick up some baby supplies. In France almost everything except perfumed soap and cellulite cream is located behind the counter, so you have to ask the pharmacist to get everything for you. Which means that instead of gathering up what you need and mutely handing it to the cashier, you are actually forced to talk.

So I walk into the one pharmacy in our tiny town (1300 inhabitants) with Max in the baby carriage and my dog Ella on her leash, and wait in line until it is my turn.

I am speaking in French, but here is a direct English translation of the transaction:

Me: Bonjour, Monsieur.

Pharmacist: Bonjour, Madame.

Me: I would like one of those thingies that you put in the baby's mouth so that it can suck.

Pharmacist: Pause of incomprehension. Is it a liquid?

Me: No, it is made out of plastic. It is for when the baby cries.

Pharmacist: Pulls out a pacifier.

Me: Oui Oui. Merci. And also, I would like one of those things that you put in the baby's nose when he has a cold to pull out the … (I don't know the words for "boogers" or "snot')… stuff that is inside the nose.

Pharmacist: Confused look.

Me: It looks like a ball on one end and is made of … (don't know the word for "rubber")… plastic. And you stick it in the nose and squeeze. Seeing that he doesn't understand, I mime a squeezing-under-the-nose motion, much to the amusement of the people in line behind me.

Pharmacist, as serious as the grave: Pulls out a weird contraption that has tubes and syringe-looking appendages.

Me: No, that's not it. It's round on one end and…(don't know the word for "pointy")… little on the other end.

Pharmacist: Confused look.

Me: Give me a pen and I will draw it for you. I draw a nasal aspirator.

Pharmacist: Ahh! He pulls out a nasal aspirator. In France we use this for… (and I didn't understand the rest – something like "putting medicine in the ear".)

The pharmacist pulls out the tube-and-syringe contraption that he showed me before. "This is what we use to clean the baby's nose." He then demonstrates sticking one end in the baby's nose, and putting the other end of the tube in your mouth so that you are actually SUCKING THE SNOT OUT OF THE BABY'S NOSE.

Me: Make horrified face.

Pharmacist, shaking head miserably: You don't actually get the mucous in your mouth. See, it is trapped in this chamber here far away from the mouthpiece.

Other customers behind me: Trying to stifle the giggling that has been going on since my nasal charades.

Me: Desperately pulling on Ella's leash, since she has her nose stuck deep into the back-end of a woman who is bending over, which the woman will realize as soon as she stands up. Max starts screaming. Panicking, I say, OK, I'll take that (point to the pacifier) and this one (point to the snot-sucker).

I pay quickly and beat a hasty retreat, amid glares (from the dog-groped woman) and laughs (from everyone else), promising myself never to return without a list that has been meticulously translated ahead of time.

Wisdom Teeth

In honor of Josephine Angelini, who had her wisdom teeth out yesterday, I thought I'd share my own wisdom teeth story, in hopes that I'd get some stories back from you. (I'm in bed with a cold, so am in sore need of entertainment. We'll do a trade: I try to entertain you if you entertain me back.)

I was 15 and in high school in Birmingham, Alabama. All 4 of my wisdom teeth were impacted (hadn't broken through the skin), so they couldn't just be pulled. They had to be dug out. (I know…EWWWW!) Which meant I had to be put under.

When I was told I would be given an IV with drugs, I freaked. I had a needle phobia that was so exaggerated that I used to pass out if I even saw a shot coming toward me. So I convinced the dentist to give me laughing gas before he inserted the IV into my hand.

Things were going fine until I was just about to go under, when all of a sudden I had this kind of waking nightmare that was so clear and realistic that I was in a state of horror as I went unconscious. I "dreamed" that the dentist couldn't figure out which tooth to pull, so he pulled ALL OF THEM. I could even feel it. My mouth was empty except for one tooth, and the dentist was yanking it out.

I woke up in a little room with my mom sitting next to me, saying, "Honey, I think we can talk about that later." Whatever drug I had been given was acting on me like a truth serum, and I had been telling my mom all of my secrets: for example the R-rated movie I had gone to with a boy on a car date. (It was "Cheech and Chong" with Bo Kirkpatrick, and I had claimed he was taking me to "Chariots of Fire".)

After that, for some reason, I decided I needed to get out of there and began trying to trick my mother to leave the room and get me water so that I could try to escape. Twice.

Flash forward to three days later. Something gross had happened to my teeth (a condition called "dry sockets", which, by the way, I think would be the perfect name for a death metal band, as long as you write it in lightening letters and use an umlaut above the "o"), which caused me considerable pain. My mother, a sensitive soul, couldn't stand to see her baby hurting and, along with the antibiotics, kept me completely stoned on pain pills for the entire week.

During that time, my friend William, who I was completely in love with even he was obviously gay, got his driver's license and came to take me for a ride in his new convertible. We drove around Birmingham with our friend Alison behind me, pinning me by the shoulders to the passenger seat because I was convinced that I was going to fly out of the car and up into the air.

So that is my wisdom teeth story. Now I want to hear yours.